When I arrived at work, breakfast was tea and ten-grain hot cereal with blueberries and nuts. I’m terrible at eyeballing liquid amounts and we don’t have measuring cups in the office kitchen, so I didn’t use enough water. The cereal was a little undercooked, but I ate it anyway during a morning meeting.

The cleanse menu relies on leftovers. It saves on cash and cooking time, but if a dish goes wrong, it has a ripple effect throughout the week. My beet soup failure on day two meant I had to remix lunch on day three and forgo soup on day four. The stir-fried bok choy with tofu and brown rice pilaf were plenty though, and held up well as leftovers.

The moment lunch was over, I was already looking forward to my afternoon snack: pear slices with lowfat Greek yogurt and maple syrup. Yes. Maple syrup. As good as I felt without refined sugar, I still craved sweets constantly, and this craving may have manifested itself as I packed my snack in the morning. I misread “2 teaspoons” of maple syrup for “two tablespooons.” Oops?

I got home late from work again and went to work on dinner. It was supposed to be Cider-Glazed Chicken Breasts with Broccoli Rabe and a Fennel-Lemon Relish, but since Ramsey was out and I hadn’t bought the chicken or rabe yet, I made a cost-effective cleanse dinner for one. I made another batch of the Roasted Sweet Potatoes from day one to go with the relish, made a salad with arugula and Granny Smith apple, and heated up a few scoops of lentils. Dessert was a simple peeled orange. I missed the chocolate, but after my maple syrup transgression, it was for the best.

Coming up on day five: more remixing and a sweet curry.

Read my other cleanse posts.

I also modified the suggested lunch. Monday night’s salmon barely made it out of the pan so I didn’t have any leftovers. In its place, I packed lentils and Greek yogurt to go with the grapefruit salad. Grapefruit salad, where have you been all my life? You may be able to tell that I mangled the grapefruit during the slicing process. My hack job was so bad that one of my coworkers asked if there was raw chicken in my salad. I need to learn how to cut citrus fruit.

My afternoon snack was avocado on rye crackers. As I spread the avocado with a butter knife, a line from this weekend’s The Splendid Table podcast kept looping in my brain: Margo True, the food editor of Sunset Magazine, quoted an article subhead from the seventies about the avocado. “It’s endlessly versatile! It’s a dip! A sauce!  A dressing! A spread! It’s guacamole!” It’s also my new favorite snack.

I got home late from work, exhausted and ready to collapse, but it was time to make dinner: stir-fried bok choy and brown rice and carrot pilaf. Both recipes were easy to make, but the pilaf took an hour to cook, so I didn’t sit down to eat until 9:30. Oy. But, all of that cooking time gave me an opportunity to take pictures of bok choy. I’ve decided it’s the most elegant vegetable. Mostly flavorless, but elegant.

A successful cleanse dinner! No disasters, no beet soup spills, no lingering fish smells that pervade my apartment for days. The pilaf was also the best brown rice recipe I’ve ever had; the nutty rice flavor was perfect with the sweet carrots and chicken broth. I wasn’t hungry for a dessert since I ate so late, so I saved the citrus for another day and did the dishes.

Coming up on day four: another lunch remix and the sugar shakes.

Read my other cleanse posts.

• One (1) tiny container of Greek yogurt
• One (1) medium container of muesli (nonfat yogurt, fresh orange juice, oats, frozen raspberries, shredded apple, etc.)
• One (1) large container of mixed greens that also contains one (1) teeny tiny container of miso and lime dressing
• Two (2) ziploc bags, one containing rye crackers, the other containing chevre
• One (1) small container of French lentils
• Three (3) freewheeling produce items (avocado, apple, navel orange)

Between my meals and the make-ahead items I had stored in the fridge, like lentils and caramelized onions, I was out of storage containers. The other challenge of workplace cleansing is documentation. Behold! Cell phone photos. Muesli and iced tea for breakfast:The muesli tastes better than it looks, although I wish there were more oats.

As I mentioned yesterday, I swapped the day one and two lunches, so I had salad with oranges, avocado, and miso lime dressing with a side of lentils and Greek yogurt.

The afternoon snack was a chopped apple on rye toast with chevre arranged on one of the cheerful office plates.

Two meals and a snack. Easy, right? The came dinner: salmon with cilantro and pumpkin seed pesto, beet soup, and lentils. The pesto was easy, the lentils were already made, and cooking the salmon was a little tricky, but it turned out fine. The beet soup, however, did not. The recipe called for cutting the beets into wedges and placing them in a large glass measuring cup with a few cups of vegetable broth. After fifteen minutes in the microwave, they should have been tender, but I didn’t check. I threw them right in pot with the aromatics, added more broth, and simmered for a bit. It wasn’t until my immersion blender refused to blend that I realized the beets were still raw. This was at 8:45 and there was no way I was going through the whole recipe again. I set aside the beets and went with what I had.

For dessert, I had pear slices and a few squares of fancy Mast Brothers Chocolate.

Coming up on day three: the most elegant vegetable and a great recipe for brown rice pilaf.

Read my other cleanse posts.

The time has come to get back to healthier eating, and when I spotted Bon Appetit’s 2012 Food Lover’s Cleanse last week, it seemed like the perfect way to start. It’s focused on real, whole foods and doesn’t involve any of that juice and protein shake nonsense. The only drawback is that is requires a lot of ingredients: over 140 items for the first week alone.

To try to save money and cut down on waste, I printed out the shopping list and all of the recipes on Saturday morning to cut what I already had, what I knew I wouldn’t make, what I thought was absurd (two kinds of rice vinegar?), and to account for portion sizes. I trimmed almost half of the list, but as I stood in the middle of Fairway Market in Red Hook that afternoon, my arms laden with produce and my path blocked by half the geriatric population of south Brooklyn, I almost lost it. Perhaps the cleanse gods were punishing me for the lobster roll I ate before shopping as a last hurrah.

I got up early the next morning to make my first cleanse breakfast before a photography class in Bushwick. I made the suggested ten grain hot cereal with blueberries, but substituted pecans I already had for walnuts. It was my first ever bowl of hot cereal and it was surprisingly delicious. A new addition to my regular breakfast rotation.

I got home from my photography class around two and threw together a lunch salad. I swapped the Sunday and Monday lunches because Monday called for an entire can of tuna and I hate stinking up the office. Five ounces really is a lot of tuna: The salad was also topped with cannellini beans and a vinaigrette with minced shallots. It the dressing called for walnut oil, but I used olive oil instead since I already had it on hand.

The rest of Sunday afternoon was spent prepping items I’d use throughout the week, like a big pot of lentils and caramelized onions. I also went on a hunt for the black cod I had to make for dinner, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in Park Slope. My solution: buy regular cod—because really, how different could it be—and follow the same recipe. This solution was a mistake, because just a few minutes into cooking, this is what I had:

Yikes.

So, I salvaged what I already made for dinner and turned it into a salad of mixed greens with roasted sweet potatoes, apples, and a balsamic vinaigrette. My despair manifested itself in a whimsical pinwheel design.

The roasted sweet potato slices with orange zest and chile powder were my favorite food item from day one.

Sunday wound down with a few episodes of Stephen Fry in America on Netflix and a tiny plate of orange slices and one (1) ounce of chocolate.

Next up: Day two of the cleanse and a beet disaster.

Read the rest of my cleanse posts.

2011 Resolution Review
1. Finish planning the wedding and maintain my sanity. Done. Sanity mostly intact.
2. Stick to a strict budget to save for aforementioned wedding. No credit card debt. Ha! Oh, this did not work out. I’m not deep in debt, but there is some. I should be able to dig myself out by mid-2012.
3. Related to three: Cook four nights a week. Bring lunch at least four days a week. I cooked dinner often, but I rarely brought my lunch to work. I kept it up for a few weeks in January of last year, but eventually fell back into my sandwich or fancy salad bar routine. Just laziness.
4. Post on Apartment Dining at least twice a week. Nope. Not even close.
5. Read fifty books. Also not accomplished. I read more in 2011 than I did in 2010, but not enough to meet my goal.
6. Learn how to draw. I took a drawing class and learned the fundamentals, so I think I can mark this as accomplished. Still need a lot more practice.
7. As finances allow, attend more cultural events in New York. Saving for the wedding didn’t allow for too many outings, but the places I did go were great. A few museum trips, some readings, a few shows, etc.
8. Document more. The next year is going to be fun, stressful, crazed, and momentous. I did not document as much as I should have. Let’s mark this as not accomplished.
9. Maintain a work/life balance. Work in the evenings when it’s needed, but devote more time to creative pursuits. Nope. Definitely not. The first six months of the year were focused on wedding planning and the last six months of the year were most intense months of my working life.

Lesson learned: Don’t make too many resolutions for the year that you’re getting married, other than successfully planning said wedding.

Resolutions for 2012
1. Take at least two trips that require plane travel.
2. Take one photo per day, every day. (Yes, I know I tried and failed at this in 2010, but I just got a fancy new camera. It will hopefully serve as a motivator.)
3. Read three books a month. (I know this isn’t ambitious, but between various blogs and my New Yorker subscription, there’s way too much reading material out there.)
4. Bring lunch to work at least three days a week.
5. Take three cooking classes, preferably a knife skills class, chocolate class (need to hone those tempering skills), and a general cooking techniques class.
6. Stick to a regular posting schedule on Apartment Dining. (Let’s shoot for three times a week to start.)
7. Work out three times a week.
8. Rebuild my savings account.
9. Regain work/life balance. For real this time.
10. Take time to paint or draw something at least once a week.

If you’re cooking this week and looking for inspiration, I’ve pulled a few Thanksgiving-friendly recipes from my archives. The Kitchn has also been posting great collections of links to recipes around the web.

Side Dishes
Giblet Gravy (the infamous Mangan family recipe)
Cranberry Apple Relish
Smashed Vanilla Sweet Potatoes

Dessert
Fresh Pumpkin Pie
Apple Cranberry Pie

Friday Breakfast
Cranberry Apricot Muffins
Spiced Pumpkin Bread with Golden Raisins

Putting together a wedding registry is a daunting task for any engaged couple, but for those with microsized apartment kitchens and no available storage space to speak of, it’s especially tough. There are just so many things to want, but few items that will actually fit. So, as Ramsey and I wandered through kitchen and home goods stores with pens, paper, and bar code scanners in hand this past Saturday, I had to keep my kitchen cookware/appliance/gadget/tool lust in check. Will we really use a juicer? Maybe for a week, but never again. Ice cream maker? Definitely not. Is a berry strainer any better than a regular strainer? Probably not. After five hours and three stores, we ended up with a list of essentials that are upgraded versions of the items currently in our kitchen (along with a few new items), including:

• 10″ and 12″ frying pans
• 2 and 4 qt. sauce pans
• 3.5 quart and 7.5 qt. dutch ovens
• A real, sharp, and functional chef’s knife (along with a utility and bread knife)
• Baking sheets
• Fancy pie plate
• Quality silverware
• Serving plates and platters
• Matching dinner plates, salad plates, and bowls
• Exhaustion

Of all three stores we visited, I have to say that The Brooklyn Kitchen was the best registering experience. They provided a folder with suggested registry items, gave us a personal tour of their cookware and knife selections, and were not pushy at all. Added bonus: temporary tattoos in the registry folder!

Between now and July 9th, I need to save a whole lot of cash for my wedding. It’s not easy since I live in the most expensive city in the United States, I want to maintain some semblance of a social life, and—let’s face it—I like nice things. I enjoy going out to dinner, ordering cocktails with expansive lists of ingredients at bars, buying overpriced sandwiches for lunch during the work week, and downloading books to my Kindle with reckless abandon. In my mind, happiness is often equal to comfort and convenience.

But this life of middle-class late-twentysomething luxury is no more. As I stated in my New Year’s Resolutions for 2011, I’m cooking four nights a week and bringing my lunch to work at least four days a week. The occasional meal out is reserved for meeting up with friends or an inexpensive item to-go ($4 falafel!). I also set a strict weekly budget for socializing and personal expenses, but in order to stick to this budget and cooking plan, I needed to come up with some strategies for eating well on the cheap.

1) Make a menu in advance: By planning my lunch and dinner menus for the week on Sunday mornings, I can select dishes that have a few ingredients in common so nothing goes to waste. Having a clear picture for the week also helps me plan nights for leftovers.

2) Rely on the pantry: Although stocking a pantry requires an initial investment, having dry goods, cans of tomatoes, baking supplies, and dry herbs on hand is vital for inexpensive weeknight cooking. Imagine walking into your local grocery store on a crazed Sunday and buying just a few fresh vegetables, fruits, and cuts of meat for the week. You can pick and choose items that match your cooking style from this comprehensive list.

3) Find/create cheap recipes with big flavors: I read (too many) food blogs on a daily basis, so whenever I see a recipe that sounds delicious and cheap, I bookmark it for future use. I then return to all of the bookmarks (and my cookbook collection) during Sunday morning menu planning sessions and choose recipes for the week. My favorite frugal recipe of the year has been this lemon chicken from Serious Eats. Here it is being cooked for Sunday dinner:

4) Buy a ridiculous lunch box: I’ve always admired bento boxes, so I used a gift card from Christmas to buy the lunch box pictured at the top of this post. The separate compartments (with lids) let me pack a variety of foods for lunch every day and keep things interesting throughout the week. They’re also dishwasher safe!

5) Drink at home: Unless social obligations require it, I’m only drinking at home and at the homes of friends.

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you may recall similar declarations of frugality in the past. I admit, those were implemented for a week and failed. Since there was nothing at stake (except for my savings account), I lacked the motivation to stick to the plan. Now, my financial well-being is tied up in how much I can save for wedding expenses. There are vendors expecting checks and guests expecting a serious party.

A program like this makes perfect sense in a city where one in five kindergartners is obese, and when you consider the environmental impact of not producing those weekly orders of thousands of pounds of meat, it’s a no-brainer.

• The nutritional drinks typically consumed by the old and infirm taste pretty good. Chocolate Ensure is like a thin milkshake in a handy little bottle. The only downside is that the second ingredient is sugar. The third? Corn syrup.
• Organic pureed soups in a box are also surprisingly good.
• Despite my love of mashed potatoes, no amount of butter can make them satisfying four meals in a row.
• Chocolate pudding is very easy to make from scratch. I chose a recipe from Simply Recipes because it didn’t require a double boiler, and with an egg involved, I convinced myself eating two cups in one sitting helped my protein intake.
• Do not schedule wisdom tooth extractions before major food-related holidays. Today should have involved a chicken finger sub, but instead I nibbled on some boiled dumplings.
• No amount of painkillers could make The Watchmen seem like a good movie. All I wanted to see was a giant squid attack.
• It’s difficult to focus on reading post-extraction, but I was able to get some design work done. You can see the redesign of my personal website at mocahill.com.